Students suspected of running up long-distance bills

[Paul Howell]

Phone access codes stolen, state says

Students suspected of running up long-distance bills

07/08/2000

By Christopher Lee / The Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN ? Hundreds of Texas college students illegally obtained
state agency telephone access codes, shared them through the
Internet and ran up tens of thousands of tax dollars in
long-distance bills, state officials said Friday.

The Capitol Police, part of the Texas Department of Public
Safety, began investigating the matter in November after four
state entities reported unexplained increases in their
long-distance bills, said Tom Vinger, a DPS spokesman.

"The main culprits seem to be college students," Mr. Vinger said.
"Somehow these codes have gotten out, have been distributed
and primarily college students are using them to access the
phone system for free ? free to them, not free to the taxpayers."

Using phone records, investigators tracked the calls to hundreds
of students at the University of Houston, Prairie View A&M
University in Prairie View, Texas A&M University in College
Station, the University of Texas at Austin and Sam Houston State
University in Huntsville, he said.

"We're talking about college students all over the state," Mr.
Vinger said. "No one's been arrested at this point. It's still under
investigation. People have been interviewed. It appears the
Internet played some role ? ? not in obtaining them [access
codes], but in the distribution."

Students may have shared the codes with others by e-mail and by
word of mouth, he said. The Capitol Police are consulting
prosecutors about what charges to file and against whom.

Affected state entities include the Texas Senate and the Adjutant
General's Department in Austin, the Texas Agricultural Extension
Service in College Station, and Prairie View A&M University,
officials said.

The stolen codes normally grant access to the state's Tex-an
phone system for state employees who are out in the field and
need to call a government office on state business, officials said. 

State workers who call directly from one state office to another do
not need such codes to tap into the phone system ? and the low
long-distance rates the state commands.

Matt Kelly, a spokesman for the General Services Commission,
which administers the phone system, said he could not comment
because of the ongoing criminal investigation.

Betty King, the secretary of the Texas Senate, said she knew
something was wrong as soon as she saw her office's April
phone charges. 

"It was an exorbitant amount of money," Mrs. King said.

Senate staffers make most of their long-distance calls to the 31
Senate district offices from the Capitol, so they seldom rack up
more than $100 a month in charges via the access codes, she
said.

The long-distance bill for April was $27,000. And the May bill
hasn't arrived. Investigators "suspect that university students
somehow obtained the access codes and are calling other
[public] colleges because Tex-an will recognize them as a state
agency and will accept it," Mrs. King said. "It's amazing what
people have the time to think of."

It took longer to identify the problem when the long-distance bill
spiked last fall at the Texas Agricultural Extension Service in
College Station. The agency, whose goal is to improve
agriculture and agribusiness, has field agents in all 254 Texas
counties who have access to the Tex-an system.

"It was like two months, and then we caught it in the third month,"
said Ronald Jackson, a spokesman for the agency. "It'd be at
least $10,000. When you have something like that that stands out,
it shows you it's not a seasonal-type thing."

Prairie View A&M officials have turned the matter over to the
Attorney General's Office and the Public Utility Commission, a
university spokesman said. Officials with the Adjutant General's
Department could not be reached for comment Friday.